Hot coffee with an artist by Nina Mdivani

Hot coffee with New York-based curators Andi Soós and Isi Litke

Staging Future Worlds, the inaugural solo exhibition of Hungarian architect László Rajk’s (1949-2019) work in the United States, opened on the 4th of October at Valerie Goodman Gallery. The works on display explore the roots of his political activism in his art and the formal and conceptual inspiration he gained from the currents he was a historical witness to. This show, initiated by Valerie Goodman and curated by Andi Soós and Isi Litke, is the first step of a long-term collaboration introducing Rajk’s visionary architecture to the US audience. The exhibition is more archival in nature, highlighting a larger need to revisit the second part of the 20^th century through multifaceted public figures and artists coming from Eastern Europe.

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are 3 objects that you see?

Andi Soós: My favorite spot in New York is the garden of the Noguchi Museum. You can chill out there having coffee while enjoying Noguchi’s sculptures and the harmony of a Japanese garden. And you can reach it by ferry with the best view of the Manhattan skyline.

Isi Litke: I’m easy – black coffee in the garish light of a 24-hour diner.

Nina: The newly opened show at your gallery titled “Staging Future Worlds: The Architectural Visions of László Rajk,” looks at the legacy of Hungarian architect, political activist, publisher László Rajk’s (1949-2019). What prompted your decision to work on this exhibition?

Andi: I worked together with László Rajk between 2017 and 2019. I curated several exhibitions and contributed to publications featuring his works. He studied architecture in Canada in the 1970s and later he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University that made me realize that American art and architecture influenced his work in many ways. When he passed away in 2019, Valerie Goodman, owner of the eponymous gallery and longtime friend of Rajk, came up with the idea to display his work in New York. She introduced me to Isi Litke, and our collaboration started that culminated in this current show. 

Isi: I first met László Rajk in 2015, during my graduate studies in political theory at Princeton. I was interested in the politics of memory and commemoration, so his work–particularly his films and his architectural maquettes and drawings–made a strong impression on me. After his death, I attended a screening of the last film for which he served as production designer, Barnabás Tóth’s Those Who Remained, where I connected with Valerie Goodman. This exhibition is the second project related to Rajk’s work that I’ve worked on with Valerie; the first, Drawing as Monument and the Material of Memory, was a workshop on his architectural forttages held in conjunction with Plymouth College of Art.

Nina: László Rajk was a son of László Rajk (1909-1949), Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary executed by Mátyás Rákosi during show trials. How did his father’s figure affect Rajk’s artistic path?

Andi and Isi: Rajk’s father’s trial was particularly notorious, which had the effect of keeping him in the public eye in Hungary from a young age. He often spoke about this as a mixed blessing. Being known to the authorities resulted in more frequent surveillance throughout his life, but fame also had the effect of protecting him; as a staunch human rights advocate, Rajk used this “fated privilege” to protect others on a number of occasions. His family history also, of course, motivated his principled opposition to authoritarianism and politically-engaged artistic practice.

Nina: Rajk left a prominent legacy as an architect. Which specific building or project included in your show is of a particular interest to you and why?

Isi: In the 1970’s and 1980’s artists and architects across Eastern Bloc engaged with the legacies of Suprematism and Constructivism took up the tradition of “paper architecture” – visionary and unrealized architectural concepts, often submitted as entries to international competitions. Striker’s House, an architectural concept created by Rajk alongside Gábor Bachman, Miklós Haraszti, and György Konrád, was submitted to the annual Residential Design Competition sponsored by the Japanese architectural journal Shinkenchiku [New Architecture]. The 1985 competition, judged by architect Tadao Ando and organized around the theme Bulwark of Resistance, called for entries to “[s]pecify the conditions against which you feel a need to resist and design a house that will be a center of resistance in the midst of those conditions” (Shinkenchiku 5 (1986), 9.).

Striker’s House commemorates the shipyard strikes in Poland that culminated in the 1980 Gdánsk Agreement between the Polish People’s Republic and the Solidarity trade union.

These axonometric drawings depict an industrial building on rails, adorned with an abstract stickle and, in a nod to Constructivist aesthetics, black and red wedges. The slogan “Labour and Act” emerges from the top of the structure, a reference to two journals, A Tett (The Action [1915]) and Munka (Labour, [1927-1938]), published by the Hungarian avant-garde writer, artist, and theoretician Lajos Kassák.

The strike, Rajk noted, “is the extreme extreme of peaceful resistance. It is not only peaceful, but you put yourself and your family in danger. It is like standing in front of the guns naked. The resistance is your own self-sacrifice. This is what we want to demonstrate with a house which first loses its exterior and finally stands naked” (László Rajk, quoted in David Crowley, “Staging for the End of History: Avant-garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in Eastern Europe.” In Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 122-123.).

The concept was considered politically incendiary enough that the work was only able to reach Japan with the support of a contact in the American Embassy in Budapest.

Andi: The 1988 series of digital and hand-drawn illustrations Rajk created in the Paris headquarters of Apple was a new discovery to me. In 1988, Rajk was working in Paris to design a memorial in the Père-Lachaise cemetery for prime minister Imre Nagy and the martyrs of the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Artist Pierre Ponant and his circle of friends introduced computer graphics to Rajk, a technique that was still relatively uncommon among artists at the time. The series evokes the aesthetics of early video games, futuristic architectural renderings as well as some of the urban concepts of the avant-garde British architecture group, Archigram. The works playfully combine architectural fantasy with various political references, such as the flag with a hole, a symbol of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the motto liberty, equality, fraternity (liberté, egalité, fraternité) originating from the French Revolution. 

The drawings represent Rajk’s deep interest in technology and world-building through design and art while also manifesting a profound political concept. Starting in the 1970s, Rajk was an active member of the underground political movement called the Democratic Opposition. This group consisted of Hungarian intellectuals, philosophers, writers, and artists who clandestinely gathered in private apartments and circulated samizdat journals. Rajk played an essential role in the transition to democracy in Hungary, culminating in the peaceful establishment of a democratic system in 1989. Throughout his life, Rajk maintained a keen interest in technology, ultimately contributing to the development of Hungary’s first design master’s program in game design.

Nina: Politics of memory and how we look at the Communist past of Eastern Europe has changed over time. Taking into account current geopolitical repercussions in that part of the world, which set of lenses should we use when we look at figures such as László Rajk? 

Andi and Isi: One thing our show looks to highlight is Rajk’s engagement with the revolutionary aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists in the years following the 1917 October Revolution. Like them, he stressed the sensuous dimension of liberation, and emphasized the use of new technologies, materials, and techniques to improve the lives of the masses. From the 1970s, he was involved in Budapest’s underground art and samizdat culture. Like many figures associated with this scene, Rajk went on to serve in Hungarian parliament for a short time after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but resigned in protest when state-level corruption resurfaced in Hungary.